Snape's Predicament
by Lily Potter-Malfoy
Summary: There are reasons why Snape's hair is so greasy...


It was beautiful outside, the birds were chirping and the sun shone bright, and Professor Severus Snape couldn't be in a worse mood. His back ached and his nose was drippy, his throat was sore and he was alternately cold and hot. It was the first semi-favorable weather Hogwarts had seen all winter and Snape had a cold.

"Well Severus, you shouldn't have been out lollygagging around the grounds so late at night without a cloak" Poppy had scolded him as she measured out his Pepper-up potion. Snape had scowled. Sure he had been _lollygagging _if by that she meant out scouring the grounds for a student's perilously important missing cat. Which was what he had been doing out of his warm dungeon rooms at such a late hour, looking for a snot nosed first year's cat. He had spent a grand total of four hours crouching around the enormous campus calling "Reeses! Reeses! Here kitty kitty!" and feeling like a complete and total ponce.

"Bloody cats!" Snape muttered venomously, glaring at the wall opposite his bed. Now he was stranded miserably in his, surprisingly brightly furnished, dungeon room with nothing but a girly mag and some shampoo to keep him company.

"I suppose I should take this chance to wash then" said Snape, glaring dubiously at the bottle of "morning breeze" scented shampoo that sat rather innocently on the table next to him. Snape had very many doubts that one could bottle the smell (if there really was one) of a morning breeze. Nevertheless his hair was getting exceedingly greasy and Filch had been on him about having himself a bath.

"Bloody squib! Who really needs to wash their hair every bloody day anyway?" muttered Snape bitterly; glaring even harder at the shampoo in hopes that it would spontaneously combust. But, as it were, the fates were completely against Severus Snape that particular day and his hopes were naught but that, hopes.

Grudgingly, Snape rose from his bed and thrust his warm quilted duvet from his body, seizing the aforementioned girly magazine, he slogged his way to the washroom silently willing the water not to work, or some random creature to appear in the bathroom and kill him. Some wondered why Severus Snape had such an aversion to washing his hair specifically. It wasn't that the man lacked hygiene, on the contrary, he was a veritable neat freak but his obsession over cleanliness ended somewhere in the vicinity of a millimeter beyond his hairline.

Truthfully, Severus Snape had been traumatized as a very small child living on the moors of Ireland. He had been frolicking (yes _frolicking_) gaily along the hills on a blustery Monday afternoon and, perhaps it was because it was a Monday and thus completely prone to ending up a very bad day, but he ended up falling off a rather inconveniently placed cliff that gave way to particularly sharp drop into the foaming sea.

Little Severus had given a suspiciously feminine scream and dropped into thesea which was unpleasant and cold. To such a young boy, hovering on the brink of 14 (I suspect people are given to laughing at this point), all that sea foam and all that water in one place at one time currently trying to choke the life from his painfully oxygen deprived lungs was quite scarring. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on who you are) young Severus emerged choking and gasping and looking quite like a startled wildebeest from the foaming sea. Upon reentry of his home, his mother had ordered him to take a bath (the mortal enemy of any young boy) which he had done quite agreeably. The bath went well until he touched the water to his head and lathered. The foaming and the water and the fact that his mother had bought him a particularly foul smelling sea salt scented hair shampoo combined to create the effect of the sea, and while this would be quite relaxing under normal circumstances, young Severus Snape had just finished nearly drowning in the sea. Needless to say Snape never had quite the same regard for water or hair washing as ever before.

Now, some years later, when Severus Snape was not so young and when the sea that he had fallen in has long since been turned green with pollution the effect of the scarring incident is still imprinted in the poor man's mind. Severus Snape was forced to wash his hair every once a month by decree of the Ministry of Magic following an incident involving Snape's hair, oil, the Knight Bus, and a caravan of flaming straw on Beltane. Said incident came to be known as "The Hair Oil Incident" and was filed under "abnormally oily hair" in the Ministry of Magic's "Abnormal Accidents" division. The incident was also used in the book entitled "Hair and Why We Should Tame it" by Belinda Beryllium. This also happens to be the main textbook for the Hogwarts special studies course entitled "Hair: Magic and Not" a class that illustrated the ways about hair. Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil had taken said class and received said text. During class Ron Weasley had listened in on their mindless chatter and overheard a particular tidbit involving Snape and hair. Needless to say, Snape's hair fiasco had been circulated widely around the school within minutes and he had lost entirely all the effect he had hadover all the students for weeks. It was a catastrophe of epic proportions.

Snape scowled.

"I hate cats" He said.

END

hmmm...I seem to be doing a bunch of Snape type thinking lately. So here's a reason for Snape's greasy hair! Review por favor! I'm thinking of writing "The Hair Oil Incident" hmmmm...


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